Book Review: Blood Work

Tucker, Holly. Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution. 

W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (March 21, 2011)


 


In Blood Work, Holly Tucker presents a history of scientific discovery, as rival doctors in England and France vie to be the first to prove that blood circulates and can be transfused from one living creature to another.

Although Blood Work is a true story, based on historical evidence, heavily footnoted and bearing an intensive bibliography, Tucker punctuates the tale with lurid, gruesome vignettes and pure speculation. She intersperses fact with graphic descriptions of medical procedures guaranteed to turn the stomach, speculations about horrific social habits like dining at the same table corpses have been dissected on, and fanciful, Gothic-fiction-worthy scenes of plague-ridden streets in London, rat-infested civic buildings in France and long-term care facilities in both nations sorely need of a visit from an omsbudman. It's like reading a history text marked up with the verbal equivalent of doodles all over the margins.

So. Of course I adored it.
 
Tucker takes a fascinating segment of history in its own right and turns it into the best kind of trashy pool read* -- great entertainment with a genuine nutritive value. She does a masterful job of pulling together medicine, history, philosphy, and politics to create a broad view of a controversial topic in an appalling time... all in soap-opera-esque spoonfuls guaranteed not to overtax the attention span. How did Ms. Tucker get so good at hiding nuggets of knowledge in mouthfuls of sensationalist sugar? She's an Assistant Professor teaching courses on the history of medicine as well as courses on French history and culture at Vanderbilt University. And this book is guaranteed to cut through an undergraduate's beer coma as quick as a barber slicing into a mongrel's jugular.
 
In Blood Work, Tucker will take you on a wild ride from gory, gross-you-out horror flick to political intrigue and court room drama. And although I didn't always agree with Ms. Tucker's points or interpretations, I raced through the book in several hours, highly entertained until the end. 
 
Some of the many memorable moments from the book:
 
Plague doctors
 
1664: A comet appears. People in London freak out, saying it portends doom. Scientific thinkers say,"Superstitius hogwash."
1665: Plague wipes out half London.
1666: The other half of London burns down.

FREAK-AY.

Wandering through the streets of this chaos and the stacks of dead on the streets, doctors would investigate the homes of the sick to see if the plague was present. To protect themselves from contamination, they wore 17th century haz-mat suits: long cloaks, gloves, and elongated masks with goggles. The elongation was to hold incense and medicinal herbs to burn and, they believed, "purify" the air being inhaled by the physician.

Can you IMAGINE being stuck in the smoldering remains of London in 1666, seeing these guys roaming through your neighborhood like freaktastic harbingers of DOOM? I believe I would flat-out wet myself.



Yummy Mummies

A quote from page 176:

The "mummies" were destined for export to Europe, where they were prized for their purported curative properties by even the most highly respected physicians. Small bits of dried mummy flesh, ingested either whole or powdered, were believed to cure a wide range of ailments, such as headaches, paralysis epilepsy, vertigo, earaches sore throats, scorpion stings and incontinence. Like most Europeans, Martiniere had always believied that the mummies had been pulled from the ancient sands. Instead the apothecary-turned-body-trafficker admitted that smallpox, leprosy, or plague provided a steadier supply of bodies.

Wha-aa-aat?  They ate... powdered... wha-aa-aat??

 

Pirates vs. Ninjas

Among the memorable historical figures introduced are Jean-Baptiste Denis the reputation ninja (my words) and Henri-Martin de la Martinière, pirate-turned-Paris-physician (Tucker's words). At the end of the book, they fight. (Sort of.)

Any book that involves pirates vs. ninjas is instantly awesome. End of discussion.

Great, gruesome fun. Take a moment to thank God you weren't born in the 1600s, then go get thee a copy of this book. And a bag to barf into while you're reading it. But I mean that in the most highly complimentary way possible.

*Pool read

 n. A book that involves little or no effort to read. "I just want to lounge by the pool, read trashy novels, and drink."